Running Windows Server 2012r2 w/ Hyper-V on VMplayer…

Have you seen the movie Inception? There was a part there where they were doing a dream within a dream, which is typically what I wanted to achieve with my nested virtualized lab. I am running MS Windows Server 2012r2 as a virtual machine on vmplayer, however I wanted to play around with hyper-v. Considering that my server is already virtualized and installing hyper-v would give me the following error message…

I’ve googled around and most of the work around involved typing a couple of powershell commands to make it happen. I just can’t be bothered typing a number of scripts, don’t get me wrong, I love powershell but I know there’s gotta be a way simpler way around this. The best solution I’ve come up with success is what I will be sharing with you in this post:)

What do you need? Definitely you need a PC capable and powerful enough to run nested VMs, installed with VMPlayer and a copy of Windows Server 2012r2 iso.

Once you get vmplayer running, click Create a New Virtual Machine, choose “I will install the operating system later” radio button, and click Next >

Now the next step is really crucial, on the “Select a Guest Operating System” page, tick “Microsoft Windows” radio button and under the version drop down menu, choose “Hyper-V (unsupported)”. (Again I can not stress out how important this step is) Click the Next > button for the next couple of pages until you reach the “Ready to Create Virtual Machine” page .

Click the “Customize Hardware…” button and device list, click on processors, under the “Virtualization engine” section, make sure you tick “Virtualize Intel VT-x/EPT or AMD-V/RVI” and the “Virtualize CPU performance counters” check boxes.